Posted on 01/12/2012 5:21:20 PM PST by blam
This Map Shows Where All The Trees Are In The US
Dina Spector
Jan. 12, 2012, 2:48 PM
NASA's Earth Observatory just released a map illustrating where all the trees are in America.
The map was created over six years by Josef Kellndorfer and Wayne Walker of the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) in collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey.
The dark swaths of green represent parts of the country with the greatest concentration of biomass.
You can see dense tree cover in the Pacific Northwest as well New England, which has been reforested after intensive logging in the 18th and 19th centuries.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
A good part of that “strange slash” in PA is valley farmland.
I’ve seen pics of my town here in MA back in the OLD days and it was completely stripped. It’s amazing to see the difference between now and then.
“I had three wandering around my back yard a few weeks ago.”
We’ve got a semi-tame herd of 15 or so that pretty much have the run of our little town — our big topic of conversation this time of year is how to keep ‘em out of our gardens, without hurting their little feelings... ;)
OMG...you DO have it thought out!
I’m with you. I don’t know about there, but they have laws in this state about trapping (specifically beavers) and then the same dingbats who put all the laws in place whine about the flooding.
Liberalism is a mental illness.
Great map. You can see where Tornado alley rips up saplings before they ever can cast a shadow, and you can see where the TX hill country is the greenest spot in TX after the Piney Woods.
I can’t live without trees over me, under, beside, in front of. The prairie drive to Houston or Dallas depresses me.
ROLL TIDE!
See that dark patch at the top left of our country.... those are my trees.
I’ve been pushing for a long time for our WA license plates to read : “Chop Wood or Die”.
I stayed in Frisco for a few months back in the 80s and hated the lack of trees. I spent a week in Longview on my way back north and liked it there though.
Kudzu doesn't count.
but the truth is, it is a lot more powerful than we are.
Exactly.
And there is a good example of that on the map itself.
If you look closely, you will see two very dense green strips running north-south on the west coast.
On the inside strip, if you look up towards the State of Washington, you will see two white dots of sorts.
The top dot is pretty close to me, about 30 miles. It is Mt. Rainier.
The dot below that (remember, these white areas are places with no trees), is almost exactly 100 miles due south of my house. Took me a bit to realize what it was.
There is a large area there bigger than Mt. Rainier National Park with no trees.
There are no trees there because Mt. St. Helens woke up with a bad hair day!!
Yes it does:
Try a run through the TX Hill Country, if you can. It’s the most amazing example of hydroponics ever. We have no soil - NONE - except for the humus composed of dropped leaves of Cedar, Oak and Elm, and lesser native shrubs.
Our soil is limestone (called caliche once you grade it) and
somehow enables thickets that cease to exist once you get to ‘real’ soil out of the hills.
bump
Wow! Stunning. “Bad Hair Day”, indeed!
Yes, the ‘organic and natural’ crowd assumed that Native Americans, being the indigenous peoples who only could live in total mystical harmony with the earth. The truth is far less mystical. When, for example, they set the forest alight to aid in harvesting game, they didn’t have the means from stopping the forest fire from consuming many square miles of trees.
Today in much of the US, the old Forest Service fire towers are no longer needed because enough people live where nobody used to and fires get reported promptly. And so, in my neck of the woods, the big forest management issue is that cedar trees are taking over where oak and hickory used to prevail. This because we now choose to suppress fires instead of allowing the forest floor to be burned every few years. I can hardly wait until the enviros want to “re-introduce” fire on the heals of their “re-introduced” wolves.
My grandfather ran a pack train up to hurricane ridge. They built a resort up out of Port Angeles. Heart o the Hills. What pictures I’ve seen of Hurricane Ridge it is beautiful country.
Wiped out 1000 square miles of forest!
If you use Google maps and zoom in on it, it’s pretty stark.
But the animal life, fish, and vegetation are coming back gangbusters.
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